Theoretical prediction of Reynolds stresses and velocity profiles for barotropic turbulent jets
arXiv:1609.00603 · doi:10.1209/0295-5075/118/54002
Abstract
It is extremely uncommon to be able to predict the velocity profile of a turbulent flow. In two-dimensional flows, atmosphere dynamics, and plasma physics, large scale coherent jets are created through inverse energy transfers from small scales to the largest scales of the flow. We prove that in the limits of vanishing energy injection, vanishing friction, and small scale forcing, the velocity profile of a jet obeys an equation independent of the details of the forcing. We find another general relation for the maximal curvature of a jet and we give strong arguments to support the existence of an hydrodynamic instability at the point with minimal jet velocity. Those results are the first computations of Reynolds stresses and self consistent velocity profiles from the turbulent dynamics, and the first consistent analytic theory of zonal jets in barotropic turbulence.
References in corpus (4)
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Cited by in corpus (10)
- Cascades and transitions in turbulent flows
- A rare event algorithm links transitions in turbulent flows with activated nucleations
- Turbulence statistics in a 2D vortex condensate
- Recent Developments in Theories of Inhomogeneous and Anisotropic Turbulence
- The culmination of an inverse cascade: mean flow and fluctuations
- Profile of a Two-Dimensional Vortex Condensate Beyond the Universal Limit
- Two-dimensional turbulence with local interactions: statistics of the condensate
- Statistics of inhomogeneous turbulence in large scale quasi-geostrophic dynamics
- Fluctuations and large deviations of Reynolds stresses in zonal jet dynamics
- Irreversible energy extraction from negative temperature two-dimensional turbulence